TORONTO – If Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation get their way, a CA$33 million (US$24 million) initiative unveiled March 2 dramatically will increase patient access to made-to-measure ultrasound technology for penetrating the blood-brain barrier to treat Alzheimer's disease and brain cancer.

San Francisco-based Invitae Corp. is putting pedal to the metal in its quest to bring comprehensive genetic testing into mainstream clinical practice, reporting the acquisition of three companies – Diploid, Youscript Inc. and Genelex Labs LLC – following Tuesday’s market close. The total bill for the three deals comes to $195 million, $57 million of which is in cash.

Pharma has not gotten terribly serious yet about integrating digital health tools into clinical trials, let alone into their product offerings, despite the potential benefits they could offer when it comes to patient adherence, compliance and experience. Still, oncology giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has made a small step in that direction by partnering with Paris-based digital therapeutics company Voluntis SA.

TORONTO – Newpro3D Inc., of North Vancouver, British Columbia, is making its ultra-fast 3D printing technology available to Düsseldorf, Germany-based Henkel AG & Co. KGaA to help it expand into production scale, additive manufacturing of medical devices. Newpro3D’s digital light processing (DLP) system enables its customers to manufacture hard and soft anatomical models used in surgical planning “at record speeds,” said Newpro3D COO Gabriel Castanon, eliminating the slow mechanical processes in more conventional 3D printing techniques.

AI-based, digital pathology startup Proscia Inc. has partnered with the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) to advance the practice of pathology via artificial intelligence (AI). The pair will start with prostate cancer and then plan to move on to validate approaches in several additional pathology subspecialties.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Mass., has made a bold play in the molecular diagnostics market, including infectious disease testing, with its proposed $11.5 billion acquisition of Qiagen NV, of Venlo, Netherlands. Word of the deal comes after reports late last year that named Thermo Fisher as a potential suitor for Qiagen. However, in late December, Qiagen said it had wrapped up a review of potential strategic alternatives and decided its standalone business plan represented the best opportunity for value creation.

TORONTO – Montreal’s McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (The Neuro) have entered a research agreement with Pasadena, Calif.-based Fuzionaire Diagnostics Inc. to detect and treat neurodegenerative diseases through molecular imaging.

London-based Livanova plc has entered a collaboration with Verily Inc., an Alphabet company, to enrich data from its RECOVER trial using tools and analytics developed by Verily. The study, which kicked off last September, is assessing the effectiveness of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) therapy for patients with difficult-to-treat depression (DTD).

PARIS – Vygon SA, of Ecouen, France, has acquired Advanced Perfusion Diagnostics SA (APD), a startup based in Lyon, France, that has developed Ikorus, a device that detects changes in visceral microvascular blood flow in the most critically ill hospital patients. Vygon did not disclose the financial details behind the agreement.

Making routine diagnostic blood tests less invasive, easier, cheaper and more accessible is a worthy goal. But achieving it has eluded many, including former unicorn startup Theranos that boasted it had achieved precisely that but then was later exposed as a fraud. Established med-tech player Becton, Dickinson and Co. (BD) and Babson Diagnostics Inc. have established a long-term strategic partnership to bring laboratory quality, small-volume blood collection into the retail pharmacy setting.